Last month some of the young mothers at Church of the Ascension’s day-care center had a meeting featuring a lawyer who spoke of making out wills and putting their households in legal order.
“It just hit me so unexpectedly hard,” said Gina, 25, the mother of a 10-month-old son, recalling the meeting in the basement of the Episcopal church at 1119 N. LaSalle Drive.
“I started crying afterwards on my way to the parking lot and couldn’t stop my tears all that night. I was so depressed, I couldn’t get out of bed for a couple of days.”
She said she found some comfort two weeks later at another meeting when the other mothers spoke of having been equally tearful and immobilized by the lawyer’s matter-of-fact presentation. All the mothers at the meeting have AIDS or have tested positive for the HIV virus.
Kara Klein, the social worker at the day-care center who brought in the lawyer, expects just as much trauma at a mothers’ meeting this month. This time she is bringing in an expert to advise them on how to go about finding foster parents for their kids after the mothers die.
“It’s a part of my job,” said Klein, “getting people to confront very painful but inevitable issues.”
The day-care center is formally know as the Ascension Respite Care Center. Opened in January 1992, the Ascension center is thought to be the only one of its kind in the nation, a facility dedicated to caring for families with AIDS that is not connected to a hospital or a clinic.
The idea is to give impoverished families whose children have AIDS a place their kids can play normally with other kids, no questions asked and no stigma attached. It also gives mothers and fathers with AIDS a free, hospitable setting to leave their children while parents see doctors or just take a quiet break.
The center is in the church basement, a bright, pleasant room that appears no different than any well-equipped day-care facility, with areas devoted to art, reading, music and science, and a generous play space with a tot-size kitchen, tool bench and dress-up clothes.
Though some of the children have AIDS or are HIV-infected, everybody plays and works together. All children are treated the same, AIDS-affected or not, so that anyone getting sick or cut, for instance, is tended to by a staffer wearing latex gloves.
The Ascension center, which serves 56 families, is administered by Chase House, a social service agency of the Chicago Episcopal Diocese that also operates regular day care and pre-school centers for the poor around the city. The center’s AIDS program has quickly evolved to something much more than a child care service.
“If you are dealing with a parent or parents with AIDS, they suffer often from extreme fatigue from the disease, piled on to the depression, guilt and stigma that comes with it,” said Virginia Hauser, executive director of Chase House.
“You don’t know how important it is for them to be loved and accepted somewhere.”
Susan (not her real name), is a 34-year-old blond whose striking looks belie the reality of her 12-year history as an intravenous drug user and sometimes hooker. In 1989, when she became pregnant, she found out she was HIV positive.
“I sort of just started waiting around to die,” Susan recalled. “I even kept on doing drugs. I figured, why should I quit, if I’m going to die, anyway?”
Susan quit her drug habit about the time Ascension opened and started taking her son, now 3 and HIV negative, to the day-care center.
“Before Ascension, my son and I were spending all our time together,” she said. “He was always underfoot, and I was missing every other doctor’s appointment because I didn’t have the energy to get up and get out of the apartment.”
Now, Susan said, she uses every service offered by the center. Kara Klein, for example, oversees all phases of her medical treatment and public assistance benefits.
Susan attends the group therapy and mothers’ luncheon discussion groups and gets food and toiletries from the center’s pantry. She also works there as a volunteer, sorting and stocking items.
And, of course, she has her son in the day-care center. She even found an apartment in the neighborhood so that he can be there every day in the winter months.
“Before, I really felt alone in the world,” said Susan, who has amazed her doctor with her improving health in the last year. “Since I came here, I’ve really made some great friends. My whole attitude has changed. I look at tomorrow now, and before, I didn’t. I couldn’t think about the future.”
Gina is the 25-year-old mother who couldn’t stop crying after the lawyer’s lecture. Fiercely upbeat, on her good days she evinces absolutely no evidence of the fatigue and depression that go with being HIV positive.
More Top Picks Eye Tracking Exercises You Can Try At Home
“My friends all call me the condom lady because I keep preaching to them how important it is to protect themselves,” she said. A former cellular phone sales representative and department store cosmetics clerk, she, too, discovered her illness when she became pregnant late in 1991.
A Hispanic woman who was infected by unprotected sex, she visits schools to lecture 7th- and 8th-grade Hispanic girls about safe sex. Ascension provides baby-sitters to care for her infant at home while she is lecturing.
“You want to see 900 noisy, giggly Catholic girls get quiet real fast?” said Gina. “Go with me and watch them when I tell them what has happened to my life, even though I am not a drug user and I didn’t do anything I thought was real risky-risky.
“I’m not a bad person, and I shouldn’t be ashamed, but my parents are devastated by what happened. I’m going to fight this disease in every way I can for as long as I live.”
Gina now is living with the father of her 10-month-old son. The father is HIV-negative. The baby tests positive, but, after he sheds his mother’s antibodies as all babies do by the time they are 15 months old, he has a 70 percent chance of being free of the virus and AIDS.
Kathy Thill, a former teacher and school administrator hired to run the center, said the original idea for the program was that she could refer families needing money, housing, counseling and other help to outside agencies. In reality, she found those agencies so overwhelmed that the Ascension families were either ignored or put on interminable waiting lists.
Chase House went looking for additional funding so Ascension could provide more than child care.
Now, Thill said, “Families can come her and have most of their needs met without having to run all over the city reciting their sad stories at each place.”
The Ascension center was the idea of an AIDS task force formed in 1988 by child and family care workers who feared the impact of the growing incidence of heterosexually-spread AIDS in the city.
The church charges the center no rent and even paid half the $30,000 in renovations it needed to comply for state licensing.
Now operating on a $250,000 annual budget, the respite care program has largely been funded by non-renewable federal demonstration grants. So Chase House is looking for new funding, both to keep the Ascension center going and to open up to five other centers in the city and suburbs.
In March 1988, Jeanie Pejko, 34, a Chicago-born Native American then working on Rush Street as a cocktail waitress, found she had AIDS when she went to the hospital for pneumonia. She got the disease from unprotected sex with a man other than her husband, who is the father of their 6-year-old daughter.
Subsequent tests showed neither her daughter nor husband has the disease. Though her husband has stayed with her, the disease has been a hellish, five-year experience.
Pejko became active with the Chicago Women’s AIDS project years before the respite center opened. Her daughter saw so many of Pejko’s friends die, she assumed everybody in the world was dying of AIDS, making it hard for her to make friends.
“I was feeling dreadfully guilty that my daughter wasn’t getting along with other kids,” Pejko said.
The changed has helped both of them.
Her daughter has gotten counseling and now mixes well with other children.
“This place has made me grow and learn not how to die, but how to live with the disease,” said Pejko.